LIFE AT QUORA: Free Lunch, Free Yoga, Weird Keyboards, And Much More
Right, that's it. The weird keyboard section of Viking it is...
Prepare for an avalanche of geeks ;-)
R
Right, that's it. The weird keyboard section of Viking it is...
Prepare for an avalanche of geeks ;-)
R
Sent from Birdsong for Windows PhoneSent from my Windows PhoneLIFE AT QUORA: Free Lunch, Free Yoga, Weird Keyboards, And Much More by @jyarow http://read.bi/grFbbZ
— SAI (@SAI) April 1, 2011
Sent from Birdsong for Windows PhoneSent from my Windows PhoneRT @jimsterne: Blog post on #Econsultancy: Total customer marketing data visualization http://bit.ly/gnlGGd < Jim always ahead of the game
— Sam Michel (@toodlepip) April 1, 2011
![]() | Latest tweet: The Richard Edwards Daily is out! http://bit.ly/ibMN1D |
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V interesting UX, video etc etc (and a cooler way to present as well). Think my next deck will be presented using this...should get a reaction.
Introducing the Z-Commerce Platform
Bringing the Business Cloud To Developers
Fifty-one percent of developers expect to work on SaaS projects this year. Are you one of the millions of developers planning to build on Amazon Web Services, salesforce.com's Force.com platform, Google's AppEngine, or Microsoft's Windows Azure? If you'd like to focus on your core product instead of building your own billing and payment infrastructure then keep reading. The Z-Commerce Platform makes it easy for developers to monetize cloud computing services.
Possible payments provider. They speak the right language at least and 'look the part'...
Since 1998, Phil Wainewright has been a thought leader in cloud computing as a blogger, analyst and consultant. He founded pioneering website ASPnews.com, and later Loosely Coupled, which covered enterprise adoption of web services and SOA. As CEO of strategic consulting group Procullux Ventures, he has developed an evaluation framework to help ISVs and enterprises select cloud platforms, and advises US and European vendors on messaging, positioning and go-to-market. His newest role as an industry advocate is vice-president of EuroCloud.
Interesting SaaS blog from ZDNet.
« The Future of Hardware Leads to the Subscription Economy | Main
March 24, 2011
Zuora’s 26th Consecutive Month of Product Innovation
by Luke Braud, VP of Product & Engineering
You may wonder how features "make it" on to our product roadmap. The Subscription Economy is moving very fast and our customers are constantly pushing the limits to ensure they stay ahead of the game. They are our eyes and ears "on the ground" and it's direct feedback and conversations with them them help us make decisions about which features to explore and ultimately build. We are constantly listening and collecting feedback to ensure that every customer has a voice in our innovation cycle.
For this month’s release, we’ve enhanced our notifications engine to include capabilities that allow you to further customize any type of event in our application. For example, when a customer signs up for a product or service Zuora can automatically notify your provisioning system to give that user access. Or when your customer's credit card is approaching it's expiration date, Zuora can automatically notify your CRM system and flag that account as needing action.
To see more details on this release, check out today's press release.
Thanks to all of our customers for your support, ideas and enthusiasm. Without your feedback and expertise we would not be where we are. Please continue to submit your ideas and enter to win an iPad in the process!
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Good example of a blog from a SaaS company talking to the 'insiders', ie early adopters, fellow entrepreneurs. An interesting reference point for our future comms plans. Oh yes, we will be blogging, hang on to your hats...
Response to Executive Decision Support Systems
IDEAS FOR MONITORING BUSINESS AND OTHER PROCESSES
Edward Tufte
(1) See Peter Drucker's new book, The Essential Drucker, for a thoughtful chapter on "the information executives need today." That is, you should start by considering the intellectual problems that the displays are supposed to help with. The point of information displays is to assist thinking; therefore, ask first of all: What are the thinking tasks that the displays are supposed to help with?
(2) It is essential to build in systematic checks of data quality into the display and analysis system. For example, good checks of the data on revenue recognition must be made, given the strong incentives for premature recognition. Beware, in management data, of what statisticians call "sampling to please"--selecting, sorting, fudging, choosing data so as to please management. Sampling to please occurs, for example, when the outflow from a polluting factory into the Hudson River is measured by dipping the sampling test-tube into the cleaner rather than the dirtier effluent.
(3) For information displays for management, avoid heavy-breathing metaphors such as the mission control center, the strategic air command, the cockpit, the dashboard, or Star Trek. As Peter Drucker once said, good management is boring. If you want excitement, don't go to a good management information system.
Simple designs showing high-resolution data, well-labelled information in tables and graphics will do just fine. One model might be the medical interface in Visual Explanations (pages 110-111) and the articles by Seth Powsner and me cited there. A model for tables might be the supertable, shown in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, p. 179. More generally, see chapter 9 of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The displays should often be accompanied by annotation, details from the field, and other supplements.
Sparklines show high-resolution data and also work to reduce the recency bias prevalent in data analysis and decision-making. Sparklines are ideal for executive decision support systems. See our threads on sparklines:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1&topic=
and on the implementation of sparklines
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000Lk&topic_id=1&topic=
(4) For understanding a process and for designing a display for understanding a process, a good way to learn about what is going on is to watch the actual data collection involved in describing the process. Watch the observations being made and recorded; chances are you will learn a lot about the meaning and quality of the numbers and about the actual process itself. Talk to the people making the actual measurements; maybe you'll learn something.
(5) Measurement itself (and the apparent review of the numbers) can govern a process. For example, in printing my books, I ask that during the press run that the density of the black ink be measured in 6 or 8 different positions on every 3000th sheet being printed. These pulled sheets are then inspected shortly after the run and before the next run. The idea is to try to ensure that the color of the black type is uniform and at the right level of blackness in 3 ways: (1) across the 8 pages printed up on each sheet of paper, called a "form", (2) over the 40,000 sheets printed of that form, and (3) over the many forms making up the entire book. We sometimes review these pulled sheets the next day to check these density readings and to yell at the printer if there is a problem. But mainly the mere fact that the printers are making these measurements keeps the process in control. And the fact that someone might review the measurements.
Note that this example is mainly just common sense in workaday action; no jargon about an Executive Decision Protocol Monitoring Support Dashboard System is needed. In fact, such jargon would be an impediment to thinking.
(6) My own encounter with a real business trying to improve management data and the display of that data was in consulting for Bose. At one point it appeared to me that too many resources were devoted to collecting data. It is worth thinking about why employees are filling out forms for management busybody bureaucrats rather than doing something real, useful, productive. The story of this work is told in Michael H. Martin, "The Man Who Makes Sense of Numbers," Fortune, October 27, 1997, pp. 273-276; and in James Surowiecki, "Sermon on the Mountain: How Edward Tufte led Bose out of the land of chartjunk," Metropolis, January 1999, pp. 44-46. Both accounts make me appear excessively heroic. These articles are posted in the NEW section at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/fortune_97 http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/metropolis_0199
(7) Most of all, the right evidence needs to be located, measured, and displayed. And different evidence might be needed next quarter or next year.
-- Edward Tufte, August 27, 2001
Some interesting thoughts from Edward Tufte on DV in business, worth a read.
Specializ[sic]es in 'data visualiz[sic]ation